The Marples’ family had apparently been active in the Hollis Street district since at least 1787, when Samuel Marples, ‘cutler’, was listed in Holles [sic] Croft.  This was presumably the father of Samuel (bapt. 20 May 1784) and Benjamin (bapt. 14 February 1783).  Their mother was Hannah.  Samuel and Benjamin were first listed in 1817 in Solly Street as manufacturers of pen and pocket knives.  Samuel rented land in Brocco (off Hollis Croft) at favourable terms on an 800-year lease from the Hollis Trust and Hospital.   (The charity had been founded in 1703 and gave the road its name.) The brothers specialised in fish-hook knives – with a fish hook as part of their trade mark.  Someone who remembered Samuel and Benjamin attending a dinner paid for by the Trust, stated: ‘I had the pleasure of knowing them well – honesty and truth were in them, and when one died the other could not live; he did not long survive his friend, his companion, his brother … [though] … inseparable as they were, it was the rarest thing in the world to see them without their wives.  The four were always together and formed a most harmonious quartet’ (Leader, 1876¹).

Samuel, who continued to live in Solly Street, died on 29 October 1842 (aged 59); Benjamin, West Grove, died on 11 May 1843, at the same age.  They were buried in Ecclesall churchyard.  Samuel’s wife, Ann, was enumerated as a ‘proprietor of houses’ in the 1851 Census, when she was living with her family in Glen View, Western Bank.  At that address was her son, Benjamin Marples (aged 22), who was a ‘cutlery merchant’.   In the early 1850s, Benjamin became a partner in H. G. Long, but he died at Broomfield on 2 April 1866, aged 37.  He left under £25,000 and was buried in Ecclesall.   His mother had died on 23 January 1856, aged 72, and had been buried in the same cemetery.

1. Leader, Robert E, Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (Sheffield, 2nd edn 1876)